FILM CRITICISM

Nosferatu (2024, dir. Robert Eggers): The Bride of Death

0.

We are lonely because we cannot resolve to die, and therefore we are sad.

1.

Have you ever had such an experience? Lying in your familiar bed on a dark and silent night, just as you were about to fall asleep. Feeling, with your entire body, each breath you draw echoing in your ears, and becoming vividly aware that you are dying. The terror that your beloved parents, friends, and family can never escape the inevitable and irreversible separation awaiting them, and that you, too, will one day arrive at that final moment — at ten seconds to death, nine seconds to death, eight seconds to death — and feel it with perfect clarity. In moments like that, there is nothing you can do except leap upright in fear, wander the room, and desperately plead with yourself. Please let me forget this inescapable death as quickly as possible.

Robert Eggers’s signature Gothic horror is a remake of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu. Returning to a century-old classic, the director’s point of departure is the fear of death. What must be distinguished, however, is that this is not a relational fear born from someone appearing to kill you, but a fear generated by the self that fears death. Just as the “fear born of ignorance” in The Witch and the “fear of guilt” in The Lighthouse were both creations of the self, Robert Eggers’s cinema is a relentless exploration of the weakness buried deep within.

2.

The film begins with Ellen writhing alone in her bedroom. More striking than her loneliness is her unusually young age. The loneliness of an adolescent girl, at an age when one contemplates the universe itself, is less a matter of sexual longing than a fated solitude shared by all beings who must face their inevitable deaths alone.

The girl who trembles before the fear of death enters into a pact with Nosferatu. Having defied the natural order, Nosferatu is the “desire to deny death,” and becoming his bride means that she, too, has become someone who denies death on an ideological level. Having made a pact with a shadow, Ellen moans and cries out as though sharing a bed with an invisible being. The staging suggests that sex in this film will signify a response to death in a complex sense. The film continues to show little hesitation toward sexual depictions, yet as any viewer would agree, such depictions are hardly sensual. Eros functions only as an image that repeatedly makes us feel human greed, yearning, and frustration in the face of not wanting to die, while also reminding us that even such resistance is profoundly hallucinatory and temporary.

When Thomas announces that he is leaving for Romania to meet Count Orlok, Ellen tries to stop him by recounting an ominous dream. More striking, however, is the image of her lying with her eyes closed and a flower resting on her chest. She appears no different from a dead person propped upright. Immediately afterward, she becomes angry upon seeing her husband’s gift and asks why he killed the flowers. This, too, suggests that her vision is already filled with death.

The scene in which Thomas and Ellen kiss before parting carries the same implication. Though the goodbye kiss is expressed with unusual intensity for a farewell, it is, as noted earlier, staged less as sensuality than as obsessive thirst. The director has Thomas hold Ellen from behind, expressing that she is turning away from something, while simultaneously closing in on her black hair to suggest that her mind is filled with darkness. The darkness is, of course, death. If the kiss is a means of turning one’s back on death and fleeing from anxiety, then the film’s Eros is nothing less than the act of averting one’s eyes from death and consigning it to oblivion.

The film wears the outer shell of a story about defeating Nosferatu, but defeating him is not its true essence. Its true significance lies in Ellen finally accepting, after countless frustrations, that she is Nosferatu’s bride. Thus the ending is not a living Ellen choosing death in order to kill Nosferatu. Rather, it is Ellen, who was already dead, embracing the monstrous heart within herself that sought to deny death and had been personified as Nosferatu, and draining throughout the night the overflowing blood that symbolized futile desire. One might call it her own self-administered funeral.

3.

The place Thomas enters after being deceived by Knock’s scheme is the land of death. It is Transylvania, Romania. The cold winter landscape covered in snow is presented as an uncanny contrast to Wisborg, a place full of everyday life. The fact that people speak a language incomprehensible without an interpreter serves the same purpose.

Three kinds of people inhabit the land of death. There are the laughing, dancing Gypsies, the overbearing Count Orlok, and the mysterious, devout nuns. Together they represent three faces of humanity confronting death: the Count, who resists and denies death; the Gypsies, who accept death as part of the natural order; and the nuns, who overcome death through faith. Thomas enters the land of death as a living man, and so his presence there is naturally rejected, but permission is granted in exchange for more gold. The scene recalls Charon and seems to borrow from Orpheus entering the underworld for the sake of his wife.

In a tedious underworld, the most ordinary event is, of course, death. Thus the sight of a naked woman riding a stallion is a funeral procession. Ahead of that procession appears the vampire’s grave. It is the temptation to deny death. A Gypsy attempts to kill the vampire with a stake, but Thomas’s mortal consciousness interrupts the moment. Thomas has not yet reached the spiritual understanding possessed by the Gypsies.

The mythic imagery continues, and Thomas is drawn ever deeper. After crossing a one-way bridge and approaching Nosferatu’s castle, the Count sends a carriage. A black screen follows, with the shadows completely crushed. The carriage, pulled by no one, is like a hole torn open in the chest. Having already stepped into a place from which there is no return, Thomas is drawn inward as if sliding. What follows is a Gothic reinterpretation of Hell and a pact with the King of Hell. It is enough if one can appreciate the artistic nuances of these sequences.

Beneath the full-fledged Gothic horror unfolding through Thomas’s eyes, the director also introduces several images that will carry the latter half of the film. Realizing that he has been manipulated by Count Orlok, Thomas attempts to resist but fails, and his chest is bitten open. Through this, Thomas’s contamination is overlaid with the image of rats spreading plague and pestilence. Thomas, having fallen under Nosferatu’s curse, is ultimately saved by the nuns, and this religious coding later returns through Anna and her children.

4.

The latter half of the narrative is led by Professor von Franz. He is established as a brilliant physician who was ostracized after becoming obsessed with mysticism. Throughout the film, von Franz confronts problems with incomprehensible occult knowledge. This approach remains effective all the way to the ending without betraying itself. Even so, the significance of the occult is not essential in itself but closer to that of a complement set — the complement of human reason as symbolized by science and medicine. Science may advance enough to grant partial control over life, but death remains uncontrollable. The occult exists only as that complement, and because it never achieves victory on its own, it cannot be the film’s central concern.

Despite his domineering appearance, Nosferatu is expressed primarily through implication rather than authority or power. Darkness. Shadows. Rats. Plague. Grasping hands. The smell of decay. This is because he is not truly an active being but merely the embodiment of humanity’s self-generated desire to deny death. Count Orlok eventually arrives in Wisborg and seeks Ellen out, yet despite his overwhelming power and commanding speech, he remains unable to overcome the rule that she must approach him first. This carries the same significance.

Accordingly, Orlok’s threats after being rejected by Ellen are most naturally understood as a metaphor for reality. Rather than the Count actively killing Anna and the others, he represents the confident inner temptation that arises when, in a cruel world ravaged by plague, a fragile human being is forced to witness the deaths of precious people and cannot help but turn toward the desire to deny death. Ellen proves the Count’s confidence by failing to conceal her longing, appearing almost as though she is about to kiss him right until the moment she refuses him. “Tonight, you denied your own nature.” That line from Orlok carries precisely this meaning.

5.

If Ellen, Thomas, and Count Orlok are conceptual characters, Friedrich’s family functions alongside them as an empirical case study. His comfortable household honestly traces the destruction of a family as plague descends upon the town. Friedrich’s children, who fear monsters when they go to bed, resemble the young Ellen, and like Ellen, they fall into the grasp of the cruel Nosferatu. Anna, who endures through faith like the nuns of Transylvania, dies of the plague immediately after losing her cross-shaped pendant. Friedrich, who believed neither Ellen’s sleepwalking nor Professor von Franz, collapses after losing his family during the absence of his reason — while he sleeps. His final act, too, is to kiss his wife, who is already dead. In denying the deaths of his wife and children, it is no different from kissing Nosferatu himself. Such is the implication of the staging that has him pull his wife’s corpse from the coffin and raise it upright.

The ending juxtaposes two beds. One is the violent lovemaking between Thomas and Ellen after Thomas can no longer resist Ellen’s provocation. The other is the union between Ellen and Nosferatu. Both are farewells, though in different senses. The former is a desperate farewell to the memories and relationships of life. The latter is a solemn farewell to the self who once lived that life. With the rising sun, the Count collapses, and as Nosferatu’s body overlaps Ellen’s pale form, the film comes to an end. As an ending in which that which should die finally dies, the image of Ellen lying stretched out on her side is a scene of sorrowful yet solemn natural order. When uncontrollable death descends upon us unawares, we can do nothing but accept it. We are lonely for that reason, and therefore we are sad.

Note: Originally written in Korean, with English translation assisted by AI. Appreciate you reading.